Congratulations to former RTVF major Nicholas Park, who is now working on his Ph.D. dissertation. He checks in with the following update:

After graduating with a double major in RTVF and sociology in 2007, I briefly worked as a board-op for KFOX before leaving to pursue a graduate degee in sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I received an MA degree in 2009 and then continued on for the Ph.D. I am now officially ABD and plan to defend my dissertation this coming May. My research focuses on gay and lesbian families, infertility, and adoption, but I have also been dabbling in criminology and media studies–the media part being my attempt to stay connected to my RTVF background. To earn my keep, I teach Introduction to Sociology, Social Problems, and Marriage & Family courses at the university. I escape the corn and get back to the Bay Area whenever I can, but, in the meantime, I am living it up in the Midwest with my partner of 6 years, David, and our numerous fury friends. It’s been fun.

In fact, I didn’t know who was, although as I made my way from the stop where the water shuttle drops off people who’ve made the 20-minute trip from Venice to the Lido, the site of the film festival, I did pause to snap a photo of a phalanx of photographers. They were lined up at the place where the famous folks emerge from their water taxis and walk up a red carpet and into the festival.

Obviously people were gathering in anticipation of the arrival of someone well-known, but I was worried about being late and was simply taking the most direct path to the site of my screening. It lay directly across the red carpet, and normally, as long as no one famous is arriving, that’s not a problem.

But all of a sudden there was a flurry of activity, people started to yell and swarm, and that relatively orderly looking group of photographers expanded like bread dough. “Al! Al! Al”

And I’d like to say that I saw him (well, I did once, in Los Angeles), but that would be a lie because really, I was about 20 people back from the front of the crowd I wasn’t even trying to be part of in the first place. In fact, I was shoved, jostled, slammed, pushed, and otherwise thrown about in the frenzy of folks who wanted a glimpse of Al Pacino — all because I was simply trying to get to a screening of We Can’t Go Home Again (no, not Pacino’s film). All that, and I didn’t even get a glimpse.

And you wonder why the whole celebrity thing aspect of this experience leaves me a little cold.

Perhaps I should have gone to Pacino’s film, though, because the Ray film was … Not Good. Now, I urge you to click on the links I provided at the beginning of this post: Ray is the director of such fabulous films as In a Lonely Place, On Dangerous Ground, and Rebel Without a Cause, to name only three (if you haven’t seen them, you’re in for a treat — run, do not walk, to your Netflix queue and pop them in there). I’d seen a lot of his films in college film classes, and when I was a grad student in film at UCLA, I’d read about the filmmaking project that Ray undertook with some undergraduate film students when he was a visiting lecturer toward the end of his career at SUNY Binghamton in the 1970s. Edited and re-edited but rarely seen, this was my chance to view it.

As I watched We Can’t Go Home Again, I tried to keep in mind that it was intended to be an experimental feature, and it was the product of a different time (1970s). And given those things, and the fact that I like a lot of Ray’s work, it was worth seeing. Once. Its use of color, particularly red, reminded me of moments in Rebel Without a Cause, and its theme, to the extent that it had one, was reminiscent of some of his more mainstream film productions. And that was interesting.

But overall? It just wasn’t very good, not even on its own terms as an experiment. It was pretty self-indulgent on Ray’s part, and the students …? Despite the end credits, it was difficult to tell who was responsible for what aspects of the production. The whole thing just did not hang together. A number of folks walked out of the screening.

Now, I know it’s 40+ years later, we live in vastly different times, and we use vastly different equipment. I applaud the risks that Ray and his students took with film form (multiple images playing at once, over/under-exposure, dynamic use of color) — but I thought, wow, what would SJSU RTVF students be able to produce under similar circumstances?

Something truly amazing, that’s what. Something that would leave We Can’t Go Home Again in the dust.

I have to say, though, that while I didn’t find the movie good as a stand-alone, it was interesting to see in light of Ray’s other work, and it was pretty cool to see the members of Ray’s family and well-known archivists and preservationists present at the screening as well. Where else am I going to have an experience like that?

So here I am at the fabled Venice Film Festival, faithfully reporting in. I didn’t arrive in Venice until evening on September 2 and so made it to the festival only the next day, by which point I’d missed the opening film, George Clooney’s The Ides of March.

As much as I like Clooney and find him sort of a latter-day Cary Grant, I’m not here to see films that I know will be in mainstream U.S theatres shortly. Rather, I’ve come to Venice first to see if I can make any connections on behalf of RTVF, Spartan Film Studios, and SJSU generally. My second goal is to aim for those films that I might not see otherwise were I not at the festival in the first place.

Yesterday’s coup? Seeing Poulet aux prunes (by Satrapis and Paronnaud, who also collaborated on 2007’s animated film Persepolis, which I sometimes show in RTVF 111: Alternative Cinema). I hadn’t read anything about it in advance and, because Persepolis is animated, I was surprised when the film moved quickly from an animated title sequence into (highly stylized) live-action. Without giving any spoilers, it’s a romantic tale of a man — a musician — disappointed in love, and of the two women in his life who are disappointed as well. Quirky, sardonic, told out of temporal order, and then pulled together and put into context retrospectively by a lush final sequence worthy of Douglas Sirk, the film received a five-minute standing ovation at its conclusion. Happily, I found myself seated in the balcony of the Sala Grande in the Palazzo del Cinema, near the director, composer, and lead actors — and it was a genuine thrill to feel the audience respond so positively to the film and see how pleased the filmmakers were. Beautiful cinematography, a score to die for … it made the hype and the glitz mercifully recede into the background, and the film itself was allowed to take precedence.

Because here’s the deal with the Venice Film Festival: it’s Quite the Scene, and despite the fact that it’s the oldest, most pedigreed film festival in the world (even Cannes is second to it), I wasn’t quite prepared for that. Paparazzi are all over the place, even at the unglamorous hour of 10 a.m.; bands of police with bomb-sniffing dogs can be seen (it’s a global media event, ripe for some kind of terrorist attack, I guess); and the crowds ,.. my god, the crowds! There’s a dedicated vaporetto (water bus) to shuttle folks to and from the Venice mainland and the festival departing every half hour. Free to accredited vistors (yours truly, thank you!), it’s a crush nevertheless. One waits in line for everything (of course, that tends to be true of film festivals everywhere). The people-watching is great — I could and have lingered over cappuccino for some time at the festival, just watching the crowds go by … but it’s also exhausting!

For a fluffy journalistic riff on women. glitz, and glamour at the festival, check out this piece from the Khaleej Times.

Check out the recent success of one of our RTVF graduates! Carla Yahiro will TA a popular course, “Marketing and Social Media Strategy“ at Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program which explores some of the most exciting social media tools (including: social networks, blogs, communities, mobile, and social gaming) and how companies can use these exciting new technologies in their marketing and communications.”

To quote her bio: Carla Ivette Yashiro is an entrepreneur, a marketing communications specialist, and an Emmy® Award-Winning producer. Carla started her career in Marketing at Telemundo NBC Universal. During her 12-year tenure, she held a variety of positions in which she gained significant experience in marketing, branding, promotions, PR, and social media. After Telemundo, Carla co-founded “Gather Your Crowd,” a marketing consultancy firm that allowed her to dive deeper into the Social Media space consulting small companies and emerging web 2.0 startups. After Gather Your Crowd, Carla led the corporate marketing efforts at GoldSpot Media, a technology startup innovating in the Mobile Advertising space. Today, Carla consults technology startups in the social an mobile spaces. Carla has presented at Berkeley Haas School of Business and Stanford University on the use of social media tools for business. She has also been interviewed by a wide variety of national Spanish and English media for her expertise on the topics of branding and social media marketing. Carla earned a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Radio-TV-Film from San Jose State University in California.

Now, like the Library of Congress and David Pierce’s Media History Digital Library (see article HERE), the Academy is beginning to scan some of its materials in order to make them available to scholars and film buffs online. Its first major endeavor is its Production Art Database which incorporates records for more than 5,300 items, including costume and production design drawings, animation art, storyboards and paintings. Nearly half of those entries includes images of the original artwork, dating from the 1920s to the present day.